Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide

She forced herself to sit up and look out the window. The moon was not up yet and it was dark outside. She could not see much except the outlines of a few coconut palms, and beyond that a striated emptiness that suggested a closely shorn field. Then she caught the sound of a conversation in Bengali, drifting in from the front of the house: a woman’s voice in counterpoint to Kanai’s deep baritone.

She made herself get up and go downstairs. Kanai was standing by the door with a lantern in his hands, talking to a woman in a red sari. The woman was facing away from her, but at Piya’s approach she looked over her shoulder so that one side of her face was suddenly brightened by the glow of Kanai’s lantern. Piya saw that she was about her own age, with a full figure, a wide mouth and large, luminous eyes. Between her eyebrows was a big red bindi, and a streak of vermilion shindur ran like a wound through the part in her shiny black hair.

“Ah, there you are, Piya!” cried Kanai, in English, and from the overly spirited sound of his voice Piya guessed they had been talking about her. The woman’s eyes were steady and clear as they looked her over, and Piya had the distinct impression that she had somehow been recognized and was being assessed. Then, with an abruptness no less unsettling than the frankness of her scrutiny, the woman looked away. Handing Kanai a set of stainless-steel containers, she headed down the steps and vanished into the night-shrouded compound.

“Who was that?” said Piya to Kanai.

“Didn’t I tell you?” said Kanai. “That was Moyna, Fokir’s wife.”

“Oh?”

Moyna was so unlike the wife she had envisaged for Fokir that it took Piya a moment to absorb this. Presently she added, “I should have guessed.”

“Guessed what?”

“That she was his wife. Her son has her eyes.”

“Does he?”

“Yes,” said Piya. “And what was she doing here?”

“She was delivering this tiffin carrier.” Kanai held up the steel containers. “Our dinner’s inside. Moyna’s brought it for us from the hospital’s kitchen.”

Piya’s attention drifted away from Kanai to the woman who was Fokir’s wife. She felt a twinge of envy at the thought of her going back to Fokir and Tutul while she returned to the absence upstairs. This embarrassed her and to cover up she smiled at Kanai and said briskly, “She isn’t at all like I expected.”

“No?”

“No.” Now again Piya found herself fumbling for the right words. “I mean, she’s very attractive, isn’t she?”

“You think so?”

Piya knew she should drop the matter, but instead she went on, as if she were picking at a scab. “Yes,” she said. “I think she’s quite beautiful, in a way.”

“You’re right,” said Kanai smoothly, recovering himself. “She’s very striking. But she’s more than that: in her own way, she’s an unusual and remarkable woman.”

“Really? How?”

“Just think of the life she’s led,” said Kanai. “She’s struggled to educate herself against heavy odds. Now she’s well on her way to becoming a nurse. She knows what she wants — for herself and her family — and nothing is going to keep her from pursuing it. She’s ambitious, she’s tough, and she’s going to go a long way.”

There was an edge to his voice that implied a comparison of some kind and Piya could not help wondering how she herself would fare by these lights — she who’d never had much ambition and had never had to battle her circumstances in order to get her education. In Kanai’s eyes, she knew, she must appear hopelessly soft and spoiled, a kind of stereotype. And she could not blame him for seeing her in this way — any more than she could blame herself for seeing him as an example of a certain kind of Indian male, overbearing, vain, self-centered — yet, for all that, not unlikable.

Piya switched to a more neutral subject. “And are Moyna and Fokir from around here? From Lusibari?”

“No,” said Kanai. “Both she and Fokir are from another island, quite a long way off. It’s called Satjelia.”

“Then how come they live here?”

“Partly because she’s training to be a nurse and partly because she’s trying to give her son an education. That’s why she was so upset that Fokir had taken him away on this fishing trip of his.”

“Does she know I was on the boat with them these last couple of days?”

“Yes,” said Kanai. “She knows all about it — about the guard taking the money, about your fall and about Fokir diving in after you. She knows about the crocodile — the little boy told her everything.”

Piya noted the mention of the boy: did this mean Fokir hadn’t said much about the trip, or that he had given Moyna a different account? She wondered if Kanai knew the answer to either of these questions, but she could not bring herself to ask. Instead, she said, “Moyna must be curious about what I’m doing here.”

“She certainly is,” said Kanai. “She asked me about it and I explained you’re a scientist. She was very impressed.”

“Why?”

“As you can imagine,” said Kanai, “she has a great respect for education.”

“Did you tell her we’re going to visit them tomorrow?”

“Yes,” said Kanai. “They’ll be expecting us.”

They were back upstairs now in the Guest House, and Kanai had placed the tiffin carrier on the dining table. “I hope you’re hungry,” he said, taking the containers apart. “She always brings too much food so there should be plenty for both of us. Let’s see what we have here — there’s rice, dal, fish curry, chorchori, begun bhaja. What would you like to start with?”

She gave the containers a look of dubious appraisal. “I hope you won’t be offended,” she said, “but I don’t think I want any of that. I have to be careful about what I eat.”

“What about some rice, then?” said Kanai. “You could have some of that, couldn’t you?”

She nodded. “Yes. I guess I could — if it’s just plain white rice.”

“There you are,” he said, ladling a few spoonfuls of rice on her plate. Rolling up his sleeves, he gave her a spoon and then dug into the rice on his own plate with his hands.

During dinner, Kanai talked at length about Lusibari. He told Piya about Daniel Hamilton, the settling of the island and the circumstances that had led to Nirmal and Nilima’s arrival. He seemed so knowledgeable that Piya remarked at last, “It sounds like you’ve spent a lot of time here. But you haven’t, have you?”

He was quick to confirm this. “Oh, no. I only came once as a boy. To be honest, I’m surprised by how vividly I still remember the place — especially considering it was a kind of punishment.”

“Why are you surprised?”

He shrugged. “I’m not the kind of person who dwells on the past,” he said. “I like to look ahead.”

“But we’re in the present now, aren’t we?” she said with a smile. “Even here, in Lusibari?”

“Oh, no,” he said emphatically. “For me Lusibari will always be a part of the past.”

Piya had finished her rice, so she rose from the table and started clearing away the plates. This seemed to fluster Kanai.

“Sit down,” he said. “You can leave those for Moyna.”

“I can do them just as well as she can,” said Piya.

Kanai shrugged. “All right, then.”

As she was rinsing her plate, Piya said, “Here you are, putting me up, feeding me and everything. And I feel like I know nothing about you — beyond your name that is.”

“Is that so?” Kanai gave a startled laugh. “I wonder how that could have happened? I’m not known for being unusually reticent.”

“It’s true, though,” she said. “I don’t even know where you live.”